New SSRN Immigration Articles

“Immigration, Wages, and Compositional Amenities” NBER Working Paper No. w15521 DAVID CARD, University of California, Berkeley – Department of Economics, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) CHRISTIAN DUSTMANN, University College London, Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)IAN PRESTON, University College London – Department of Economics.  BLOGGER’S NOTE:  CARD IS ONE OF TEH MOST RESPECTED ECONOMISTS STUDYING IMMIGRATION TODAY.  ASTRACT:   Economists are often puzzled by the stronger public opposition to immigration than trade, since the two policies have similar effects on wages. Unlike trade, however, immigration can alter the composition of the local population, imposing potential externalities on natives. While previous studies have addressed fiscal spillover effects, a broader class of externalities arise because people value the ‘compositional amenities’ associated with the characteristics of their neighbors and co-workers. In this paper we present a new method for quantifying the relative importance of these amenities in shaping attitudes toward immigration. We use data for 21 countries in the 2002 European Social Survey, which included a series of questions on the economic and social impacts of immigration, as well as on the desirability of increasing or reducing immigrant inflows. We find that individual attitudes toward immigration policy reflect a combination of concerns over conventional economic impacts (i.e., wages and taxes) and compositional amenities, with substantially more weight on the latter. Most of the difference in attitudes toward immigration between more and less educated natives is attributable to heightened concerns over compositional amenities among the less-educated. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

“The Alien-Citizen Distinction and the Global War on Terrorism” Miami Law Research Paper Series DAVID ABRAHAM, University of Miami School of Law YUNG TIN, affiliation not provided to SSRN.  BLOGGER’S NOTE:  DAVID ABRAHAM IS A VERY THOUGHTFUL IMMIGRATION SCHOLAR AND ALL OF HIS WORK IS WELL WORTH READING.  ABSTRACT:  Since the start of the modern civil rights era, the notably harsh laws of citizenship and immigration in the United States have experienced some mitigation in the critical distinctions between citizens and aliens. Societies became “soft” on the “inside” while grappling with questions of how “hard” to be toward the “outside,” the border. The retrograde effects of globalization together with our security and imperial obsessions since 9/11, however, have led to a hardening of distinctions both on the inside and toward the outside. Immigration and citizenship have become more Schmittian affairs where the worthy “us” is confronted by the enemy “other.” The power of exclusion and especially of deportation has again grown more important (as it was during the Red Scares of the post-WWI and Cold War periods), making citizenship more important. As the government seeks to undermine constitutional protections in three ways — making it irrelevant who you are, where you are, or whose custody you are in — the benefits of the legal status of “citizen” seem to be in play. At the same time, we know the importance of citizenship as a mechanism for the defense of rights, perhaps especially of minority rights. Indeed, liberal immigration scholars have spent most of the past generation fretting over the discriminatory “bonus” offered by citizenship and have worked “human rights” and “due process” discourses to undermine that bonus. Since 9/11, however, a series of important Supreme Court cases has left us with only a murky sense of what rights apply to whom and where and how much of a guarantee “citizenship” offers. In this essay, we review the salient cases and seek to identify some current baselines around these “who, where, and whom” questions.

“Leveraging Asylum” U of Melbourne Legal Studies Research Paper No. 430 Texas International Law Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3 JAMES C. HATHAWAY, Melbourne Law School.  BLOGGER’S NOTE:  PROFESSOR HATHAWAY IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S LEADING REFUGEE LAW SCHOLARS.  The paper’s thesis is that recent scholarly claims that a general right to asylum now exists are unfounded. The legal arguments underpinning the claim are twofold. First it is said that even states not bound by relevant conventions are nonetheless required by customary international law to honor the duty of non-refoulement in relation to refugees and others facing the prospect of serious harm. Second, the lex specialis principle is invoked to argue that all persons entitled to protection against refoulement (not just refugees) must be granted all of the refugee-specific entitlements codified in the Refugee Convention. Taken together, the two claims amount to an assertion that there is today a legally binding and universally applicable right to asylum for all seriously at-risk persons. Although both claims have normative appeal, the author contends that as a matter of international law they are conceptually flawed. Taking account of relevant ICJ jurisprudence, the paper argues that there is neither opinio juris nor relatively consistent state practice to support the putative duty of non-refoulement. And even if there were such a norm in customary international law, the lex specialis principle exists only to resolve normative conflict, not to fill a normative void, and therefore affords no basis for the attribution to non-refugees of Refugee Convention rights. In short, there is no leveraged right to asylum

KJ